Child Poverty Bill
12:00 pm
Donald Hirsch: If I may slightly disagree with Neil, I would like to comment. It seems to me that, if you honestly apply the objectives and targets of this Bill, you will have an enormous task on your hands and a task that is very multi-faceted. What Neil’s argument rests on, I think, is a view that the Bill will distort the situation to certain mechanisms that are easier to measure. I think that that is a slightly gloomy interpretation. One would hope that, perhaps with the help of this child poverty commission, there would be the discipline of saying that you tackle some of these issues about employment, child care and other things that will be very important to get right in order to meet that income target. In so doing, you would be fulfilling quite a wide range of social objectives.
For example, if we think that somebody who is in school now might in 10 years’ time be a parent living in poverty if they do not get good enough qualifications, that person, who has had a disadvantaged upbringing themselves, needs to do better at school, to help to fulfil these income targets. That is already quite a broad strategy.
So I think that the key thing is to ensure that you create a commission with some clout and some teeth, and one that provides a sort of discipline to ensure that you really are tackling these problems in the round. The risk of having lots and lots of targets is that they duplicate targets elsewhere and also that each one of those targets itself becomes a potentially distorting measure.